CombineNet Updates its E-Sourcing Solution to Make it Easier Than Ever to Support Today's Sourcing Complexities and Global Needs

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- CombineNet, Inc. today announced that its best-in-class e-sourcing product, CombineNet ASAP®, has been enhanced with new features making it easier and faster for procurement team members to launch and manage sourcing events that benefit from advanced sourcing capabilities and support global supplier networks.

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The new CombineNet ASAP release features a streamlined sourcing event creation process for rapidly applying Expressive Bidding®, creating tailored analytics, and optimizing award decisions for spends of any category, size, or level of complexity.  In addition, CombineNet ASAP adds globalization and localization capabilities through multi-lingual supplier interfaces; capacity collection across multiple levels to help reduce supply risks; and performance enhancements to support the "big data" needs of larger-scale sourcing events.

"Adoption of sourcing technology and getting more spends e-sourced both remain challenges for many procurement teams. As evidenced by CombineNet's substantial growth over the last three years, it is clear that more and more companies are embracing advanced sourcing technologies to fill the gaps left by first generation e-sourcing tools," said Alan Himler, VP of Product Management at CombineNet.  "This release of CombineNet ASAP presents a balance of advanced functionality, usability, and performance improvements that will help more organizations support today's challenges in aggregating spends and supporting categories having complex award decision criteria."

As a SaaS-based solution, CombineNet ASAP's newest enhancements are now immediately available to all users, and include:

• New Event Creation Wizard – provides an intuitive workflow with contextual, survey-based guidance throughout the process of creating an e-sourcing event, including options for RFI, sealed-bid RFP, and multiple E-Auction event types.  This new process enables sourcing managers to more efficiently create an e-sourcing event from multiple starting points, ensures they take advantage of ASAP's most powerful event-management options, and simplifies the configuration of sophisticated capabilities necessary for advanced sourcing events.
• Redesigned Event Management – enables sourcing teams to better organize and manage their events through Web 2.0-type capabilities such as "pin to top," tagging, and tag clouds, while also streamlining event management with better access to real-time event information through asynchronous downloads, no matter how complex the report.
• Supplier-Side Globalization/Localization – allows sourcing teams to leverage higher value, regional or local suppliers in global markets, with initial support for Chinese, German, Spanish and French languages.
• Advanced Currency Configuration – adds additional support for global sourcing activities, so sourcing teams can configure advanced currency options, including specifying different bid currencies on items based on their business and financial needs.
• Capacity Across Items – enables sourcing teams to identify additional savings while reducing risk, by configuring events that collect a supplier's capacity (volume) at multiple levels as part of the bid response, including capacity at the item level and rolled-up levels such as by item family, geographic locations, or other levels.  By collecting capacity at multiple levels, suppliers are able to compete on all items within the sourcing event, while buyers can determine how to best allocate their available capacity.  This provides greater competition between suppliers, and more options for the buyer, without incurring the risk of awarding a supplier more business than they can support in total.

In addition to these new features and functionality enhancements, CombineNet has also delivered performance improvements in this release to pro-actively support the growing use of its technology by clients.  CombineNet recently reported that its customer base has grown by 22 percent and that e-sourcing event activity has increased 64 percent in the first half of 2013. The company is continually increasing the scalability and performance of its product to stay ahead of customer demand.

For more information on the CombineNet ASAP advanced sourcing product, visit http://www.combinenet.com/products/esourcing-product/index.php.

About CombineNet

CombineNet, Inc. offers supply chain-driven companies proven solutions to advance the capabilities and outcomes of their strategic sourcing efforts. Powered by the award-winning, SaaS-based CombineNet ASAP® advanced e-sourcing platform, procurement teams can more easily tackle larger and complex spend categories, increase their spend under management, and optimize supplier award decisions for their business. CombineNet also offers best-of-breed products in Spend Analytics and Contract Management, as well as expert e-sourcing services to drive next-generation results for its global clientele, which includes: Procter & Gamble, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Sears, Wendy's QSCC, Bayer, Hershey's, and more. www.combinenet.com

SOURCE CombineNet, Inc.